It pains me to say “Ivies” when discussing top colleges because taken literally it ignores Duke, UChicago, Northwestern, Williams, etc. Is there a clean term that captures these top colleges? I’ve been using “Ivies and Ivy peers” but that sounds clunky.
How about:
“top colleges”
“selective colleges”
“top tier colleges”
No phrase is perfect. Just go with it
Our high school calls them highly selective colleges.
I go with “Ivy-equivalents”, “Ivies/equivalents” or “elites”.
The problem I have with “highly selective” is that I feel it elevates the selection part too much rather than the output part. For example, until recently, Reed wasn’t very selective. A decade or 2 ago, neither was UChicago. Yet in terms of alumni achievements, UChicago is as impressive as the other Ivies/equivalents and more so than some schools with lower acceptance rates (back in 2005 or so; these days, there are very few “undervalued” elites, and you’d have to look at LACs for them).
Ivy-ish.
elite
btw- for some majors most of the ivies are not the best compared with other top colleges- some public. Remember, the Ivy League is a sports conference in the Northeast, not an academic standard. Of course most of the Ivies have honed their academics and selection process to be elite and therefore the conference has become synonymous with highest standards. They can only accommodate a small percentage of the country’s elite students as well.
Call them elite.
Elites. Thanks.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$-eater 
:)) 8-}
Selectivity is not purely a function of admit rate.
Imagine two colleges with equivalent incoming freshmen classes.
One got the class the way most highly selectives do nowadays - market the college aggressively to a very wide audience, be some somewhat opaque about actual admissions criteria and threshold, and admit, say, 10% of the 30000 kids who apply.
The other hypothetical college focuses its marketing on kids who have a realistic shot of getting in. It’s rather forthcoming about admissions criteria and thresholds - not necessarily formulaic, but pretty clear about what its looking for, who would be a likely admit, a maybe admit, and a likely reject. This college also admits 50% of the 6000 kids who apply.
But the stats, other measurables (and non-measurables) of the classes are about the same.
I would not consider the former school notably more selective than the latter. A kid applying with a 27 ACT and a 2.9 UW GPA is still a deep long shot, at best, at either school.
Anyways, I think the term “highly selective” is a reasonable alternative for the OP’s issue. Just don’t assume admit rate = selectivity.
That said, it seems that the impact of USNWR rankings and similar things has been driving holdout schools resembling my second example to be more like my first example.
fancy schools.
Super elite, top 10. Highly selective has a much wider bandwidth than Ivies and others with a less than 10% acceptance rate.
@MWDadOf3, “highly selective” still focuses on the selection part too much, though.
School A could have both higher test scores and a lower admit rate than School B yet have a smaller percentage of alums entering prestigious professional schools, getting PhDs, or becoming leaders in their field.
I’m of the opinion that the output matters most.
If there were a way to reliably measure output relative to that expected from the input (input reflecting selection effects), then treatment effects could be measured more easily. Of course, what kind of output matters may not have a consensus.
To me it mattered whether the colleges our kids were applying to offered a strong academic core that might energize an “intellectual” career of some kind. It was fairly easy to define about 30-50 such colleges, based on % of graduates who go on to earn professional degrees or doctorates.
My kids themselves had similar criteria. #1 wanted to attend “a college where it’s considered okay to be a thinker.” But it’s actually true that at virtually any flagship state institutions an intellectually inclined student can get that kind of education, especially when one considers the residential and honors colleges and other special programs that many state universities have.
So for me, I didn’t look for a label to put on such schools, nor on the “Ivy+” types of list, which commonly adds Stanford and MIT to the Ivies, but really misses not only some great universities such as Caltech and UChicago and JHU and CMU but also the LAC’s, many of which pound-for-pound produce more future PhD’s than some of the Ivies.
I count a bunch of LAC’s as Ivy-equivalents.
shrug
Funny dialogue between two dads of high school students at a party I attended about elite schools:
Dad 1: I would never send my kid to one of those idiotic elite east coast schools.
Dad 2: My daughter goes to Duke.
Dad 1: I don’t consider Duke an elite east coast school.
I was laughing at the first comment because I knew Dad 2s daughter was at Duke. Then when Dad 1 tried to fish himself out, but actually only insulted Dad 2 more, I practically had tears pouring down.
@Much2learn Love it! What motivated dad 1 to say something like that? He’s a proud public U alum? Does his child even have a chance at one of those “elite east coast schools”?
@Oldfashioned1 “What motivated dad 1 to say something like that? He’s a proud public U alum? Does his child even have a chance at one of those “elite east coast schools”?”
It came up because most of the people at the party were parents of high school students, many had seniors, and it was during the application and decision time frame. Dad 1 seemed like a religious conservative who really does not understand elite colleges at all. He probably only knows Duke as a basketball school. I do not know his daughter, but he also sounded like it was not clear to him why students don’t all just attend the nearest college to their house, so I doubt that she would be a serious candidate for Duke.
The very funniest thing was that Dad 1’s second comment was clearly sincere. He thought he was smoothing things over by excluding them from the group he was insulting. He probably only knows Duke as a basketball school, and had no idea that his second comment was more insulting that the first. Then, in an attempt to reassure Dad 2, that he was not referring to Duke, he started asking other people whether they agreed with him that east coast elites did not include Duke. You could tell from his sincere tone, that he really was not intending to include Duke in his insult at all, and that sincerity in his tone made it even funny. I had to turn my back and cover my mouth, because I could not stop laughing.
@Much2learn “Dad 1 seemed like a religious conservative … he also sounded like it was not clear to him why students don’t all just attend the nearest college to their house”
I know plenty of people like this! Near 4.0, smart, high-involvement religious students and never consider anything further than an hour away! I’m not sure if it’s sheer close-mindedness, or a control thing, or both.